In the tradition set by Abba Anthony male Christian hermits do seem to suffer an almost bizarre degree of sexual torment. (Female Christian hermits seem more prone to attacks of masochistic self-harm; Buddhist hermits seem more vulnerable to rage.) Some of this must be related to their earnest pursuit of a rather rigorous kind of chastity since what is most forbidden is most likely to rear up and threaten in any such situation. But I am convinced that a great deal of it is more related to this intensification in silence: feelings about sex, or food, or warmth, or comfort take on a vivid, even hectic, vibrancy. When those are the very things one is hoping to escape from through silence, it is not at all surprising that one starts to see one’s longings as ‘works of the devil’ and this sense of the demonic is itself intensified by the silence.
In one form or another a great many individuals report this intensification effect. Richard Byrd, a highly practical man and normally prosaic writer, describes the polar evening:
The day is not abruptly walled off; the night does not suddenly drop. Rather the effect is a gradual accumulation, like that of an infinitely prolonged tide … the on-looker is not conscious of haste. On the contrary he is sensible of something of incalculable importance being accomplished with timeless patience … These are the best times; the times when the neglected senses expand to an exquisite sensitivity. You stand on the barrier and simply look and listen and feel … the afternoon may be so clear that you dare not make a sound, lest it fall in pieces.12
Christiane Ritter, one of the few women to write about extreme terrain, describes the midwinter, twenty-four-hour night in the Arctic Circle in a similar hyperbolic passage:
There is no longer even a glimmer of day, not even at noon. Around the whole horizon only deep starry night. Day and night, throughout its circular course the moon is in the sky … It is as though we were dissolving in moonlight, as though the moonlight were eating us up … the light seems to follow me everywhere. One’s entire consciousness is penetrated by the brightness; it is as though we were being drawn into the moon itself. We cannot escape the brightness.13
Jacques Balmat, who was the first person to climb Mont Blanc, described an earlier long solo climb and the intensity of his hearing. (It is probably worth mentioning, since Balmat’s degree of terror may sound a little strained, that he was bivouacking alone at a height which in 1786 was believed to be fatal; he had made the long climb partly in order to disprove this supposition, and made it alone because no one else wanted to risk it.)
During the short intervals between the crash of avalanches I heard distinctly the barking of a dog at though it was more than a league and a half to that village from the spot where I was lying. The noise served to distract my thoughts, for it was the only earthly sound that reached me. At about mid-night the barking ceased and nothing remained but the deadly silence of the grave.14
Jon Krakauer, an American journalist who specialises in stories about ‘the wilderness’ and who is a climber himself, refers directly to this sort intensification in an account of the first major solo climb he performed, which involved a substantial period of solitary travel to reach his chosen mountain.
Because I was alone even the mundane seemed charged with meaning. The ice looked colder and more mysterious, the sky a cleaner shade of blue. The unnamed peaks towering over the glacier were bigger and comelier and infinitely more menacing than they would if I were in the company of another person. And my emotions were similarly amplified: the highs were higher; the periods of despair were deeper and darker.15
The ‘because’ that begins this quotation reads to me as if he not only found this ‘charged’ state normal, but assumed that his readers would too.
A second different experience, which I became aware of in my own silence and find in other people’s accounts too, is a sort of disinhibition.
One of the ‘harshest’ modern silences I know of was the six winter months that Augustine Courtauld spent in a small tent in the Arctic in the 1930s. For over three months of this he was snowed in and unable to leave his tent at all; and for the last six weeks he was in total darkness. His silence was moreover particularly complete – he was confined in a very small space; he had no source of music and no method of communicating even if he had wanted to. I had a telephone, Byrd had a pedal-operated Morse radio, Knox-Johnston had a gramophone.
Although his expedition was given the nominal scientific justification of weather observation, Courtauld had no particular qualifications for this and did not in fact do much of it. Less than halfway through he managed to leave his spade outside his tent and was therefore unable to dig himself out to take the meteorological measurements. He came out of the English gentleman school of adventurers and never said or wrote much about his personal experience. Indeed, his only explanation of his own motives and intentions was expressed as a wish to do something that was not ‘mere’. However, Jung commented on a photograph of Courtauld, taken quite soon after the experience, that here was the face of a man ‘stripped of his persona, his public self stolen, leaving his true self naked before the world’.16
This is what I mean by ‘disinhibited’. Jung is saying something beyond the simple fact that if you are on your own you can do what you want. This is certainly true: I was quite shocked to find how quickly and easily I abandoned many of the daily activities I’d assumed were ‘natural’ or necessary, like washing, or brushing my hair, for example: in the journal after barely a fortnight I noted that,
I managed a hot bath with care, loved the clean underwear. But I realise that all the people who have accused me of being an innate slut are right. I can delight in a hot bath and clean knickers with the simple knowledge that I probably won’t bother again this week! I think – without guilt or worry – that I could easily go feral.17
Either abandoning customary levels of personal hygiene or creating overriding and strict rules in order to preserve it seems to happen to most people; even among those who are sharing the space of their silence. In some religious disciplines washing, shaving and even dressing are seen as ‘worldly’ vanities (it is said that Jerome never bathed on the grounds that those who had been baptised needed no further cleaning)* but most silent religious communities adopt rigorous rules to govern personal cleanliness, diet and behaviour, which suggests that regulation is necessary and therefore it is silence, rather than solitude, that disinhibits. Funnily enough for me this has been one of the longer-term changes that Skye made in my life: I still have to put in a great deal of conscious effort to stay vaguely in line with an acceptable level of cleanliness and ‘grooming’. There is a freedom in being silent that allows one to challenge a good number of assumptions with less self-consciousness. It was curious to discover on Skye how far I had internalised prohibitions on things like shouting, laughing, singing, farting, taking all your clothes off, picking your nose while eating and so on. These inhibitions fall away at various rates.
But I think Jung was picking up on something more profound. I felt as though the silence itself unskinned me, and seems to have done the same thing to Courtauld. As though, to put it crudely, the superego was overwhelmed by the silence. Perhaps this is not surprising. If the contemporary French psycholinguists are right, it is through language, through words, that we enter into the Law of the Fathers – the social controls that allow ‘public’ life to be endurable for individuals. It is as though language and all its benefits were a ‘pay-off ’ for leaving the pre-lingual, warm, self-absorbed, messy and demanding state of infancy. Language is both the route to freedom and the route to ‘good behaviour’. If we abandon language – move back into the silent places we were evacuated from as babies – we might reasonably expect to shed some of the social rules that both govern and empower us. All that self-control I spent so much time learning and mastering; all those infantile joys I gave up – then I stepped outside that social place, back into infancy, out into the wild, ‘beyond the pale’.* It seems not at all shocking, really, that I found myself, for example, overwh
elmed by seriously bizarre sexual fantasies and vengeful rages of kinds that I had never ‘dared’ admit.
This sense of disinhibition is almost universal in accounts of silence. There are a very large number of individuals reporting their own loss of concern about social norms, or other people, often critical, taking note of the social peculiarities of ‘loners’. At the southern end of Skye Tom Leppard, ‘The Leopard Man’, an ex-soldier, has been living in a sort of ruin without any modern amenities for twenty years. He is a Catholic who prays for three hours a day and reads extensively. He was also, until recently, in The Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most tattooed man – his body is covered in leopard spots, even his eyelids tattooed with cat’s eyes, and he roams his very isolated peninsula, a two-hour walk or a boat ride away from anyone else, naked and unashamed. In 2002 he explained himself briefly. After he left the army, he said:
I found it difficult to settle into life as a civilian. And having worked in jobs with terrible conditions and bad pay I needed to do something different. I have everything I need here. I am lonely in the city. I am never lonely here, and I am never bored. This is my Paradise.18
There is a timelessness in his response to the rules and restrictions of ‘normal’ social life – it seems to have been repeated over and over again, at least since John the Baptist went into the wilderness and dressed in camel hair and adopted an unusual diet. (He ate locust fruit – from the carob tree – rather than the insects of the same name.)
This disinhibition may be as good an explanation as any of Bernard Moitessier’s superficially strange abandonment of the first Golden Globe race. Moitessier was the most experienced single-handed yachtsman of the entries and Joshua was potentially the fastest and best-designed boat in the race. It is clear that singlehanded sailing suited Moitessier in a more profound way than some of the other contestants. His mystical bent – and his yoga meditation practice – made the solitary and silent aspects of the race attractive rather than challenging to him.
Peter Nichols, in Voyage for Madmen, an account of the race, described Moitessier at sea:
[His] unceasing close communion with the three constant physical elements of his world – his boat, the sea and the weather around him – filled him with joy … a sailing holy man … Not since Captain Nemo has a man felt so comfortable and self-sufficient at sea. He had entered into a kind of seagoing stasis … deep in the vast middle he was untroubled by anything but the daily concerns of sailing; the rhythm of the sea, the endless passing of waves, the daily surging progress of Joshua … and his own highly attenuated skills and sensations all blended into a harmonious chord that pealed loud and clear inside and gave him peace.19
Moitessier competed fiercely throughout the earlier stages of the race. By the time he was in the eastern Pacific he was very strongly placed to win the ‘fastest time’ prize and possibly even be first home. (Knox-Johnston, always more concerned with the single-handed record itself than with the speed, had set out two months before Moitessier and was in the lead, but Moitessier was closing up on him in the faster Joshua.) Moitessier knew these facts. Nonetheless, somewhere south of Tahiti he simply ‘lost interest’ in the race. He rounded the Horn and instead of turning north up the Atlantic, he just sailed on, round the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa for the second time, back across the Indian Ocean, into the Pacific and finally landed in Tahiti. His ‘explanations’ of this fairly extraordinary decision do not immediately add up.
I have set course for the Pacific again … I felt really sick at the thought of getting back to Europe, back to the snake pit. Sure there were good and sensible reasons. But does it make sense to head for a place knowing you will have to leave your peace behind? St Helena yes … but I wouldn’t have stopped. I would have pushed on in the Trade winds telling myself, ‘Don’t be a fool, you may as well just put in a little effort, try to pick up the Sunday Times prize.’ I know how it goes. Trying to reach Tahiti non-stop is risky, I know. But the risk would be much greater to the north … I feel a great strength in me. I am free, free as never before. Joined to all nonetheless, yet alone with my destiny.20
To me it feels so like the disinhibition that arose in my own silence and in many other accounts. Normal social obligations and commitments to self and others give way, not to selfishness in the normally understood sense of that word, but to buried desires and needs, which have emerged through the silence and overwhelmed the superego, the patriarchal control, so that Moitessier, like Courtauld, was ‘stripped of his persona, his public self stolen, leaving his true self naked’. (I can hear my own defensiveness here; the number of people – including some who have never met me – who feel free to tell me that my pursuit of silence is ‘selfish’ still amazes me.)
Third, almost every account of prolonged silence I have ever read or heard about contain mentions of ‘hearing voices’, whether these come in the form of divine intervention or deeply frightening tongues of madness. As someone who has experienced these voices, I was a bit concerned that prolonged silence might be rather alarming. I know that when I set off to Skye this worried some of my friends as well. Had I known about the loss of inhibition I might have been too cautious to do it at all.
In the event I need not have worried. Although so many people do hear voices in silence, I do not think that this is evidence that freely chosen silence sends people mad. In fact, I now think that precisely because I am a voice hearer it may have been easier for me to distinguish between the various sorts of voices than it might be for others – and therefore infinitely less alarming and much easier to think about.
However we choose to interpret ‘pathological’ or ‘visionary’ voice hearing (and I am not sure there is much difference except in the eyes of the diagnostician – psychiatrist or priest), there are two forms of voice hearing which seem to me to be slightly different from this and may well be related to silence. The first of these I would call ‘stress voices’, where a kind of self-splitting occurs under extreme and difficult circumstances. Most of the self is absorbed into the ‘difficulty’, which may involve great physical pain or vulnerability, but a part of the self continues to act ‘sensibly’, positively, life protectively. This part of the personality appears to withdraw from the body and instruct it from outside it as an external voice. This voice is often harsh and bullying, but effectively overwhelms the desires to give up, go to sleep, despair or do anything singularly foolish. In his book Touching the Void Joe Simpson, the mountaineer whose accident has been made famous by the film of that title, gives a very vivid account of such a voice-hearing episode.
This response to great stress is not uncommon and does not seem to be necessarily related to silence, except in the crude sense that in more social situations someone other than oneself would be around to provide the stimulus and direction that Simpson’s voice produced. It seems a useful survival mechanism.
But there is a second, more complicated sort of voice hearing, which I think is closely related to silence and can be a positive aspect of the experience.
In my journal I repeatedly recorded my sense that I could hear singing. For example:
There is a woman, a young woman but not a girl-child, singing outside. I catch myself listening. There are almost words. It sounds as though there were words, but I can’t make them out. This does not feel scary or disturbing. Except in the first instance I knew completely that it was the wind, indeed it seems more eerie and beautiful than anything else.21
Another evening I heard a male-voice choir singing Latin plainsong in the bedroom. Almost immediately I realised that this was ridiculous; the acoustics were all wrong. The bedroom was tiny, but the sound was like the music at Quorr Abbey, a Benedictine monastery on the Isle of Wight, which concentrates particularly on the very beautiful singing of the daily prayers, or in a large cathedral, heard from a greater distance than between where I was sitting in the kitchen and the bedroom. But I could hear singing, in Latin, and I could pick up occasional words.
I have thought a lot about this phenomenon. It is possible that a great many people who spend a period of time in silence, suddenly and without any particular predisposition, have psychotic episodes, from which they immediately and permanently recover the instant they are back in society. But this does not seem entirely probable. I think there is a better explanation. In The Language Instinct Steven Pinker describes an experience which led him to believe, briefly, that he was going mad. He heard human voices emerging from what he knew to be a randomised synthesiser. This phenomenon is called ‘sine-wave speech’ and can be deliberately manipulated to represent human sentences. Simplifying wildly, some combinations of two or three ‘bands’ of sound waves create noises that can be heard as human or quasi-human voices. I wondered if the different wind sounds I described earlier could similarly combine and if this was a reason why I was hearing these distant, lovely choirs ‘singing’. I have to say that to me, this seems a complex but rather beautiful concept.22
To try to make some sense of this I went back to John Cage’s idea mentioned in the previous chapter that there is no such thing as ‘real’ silence. There is always some sound, even if it is only the sounds that the human body makes. Now the human brain is an immensely efficient interpreter of sound. Although our hearing is less acute than that of many animals, our capacity to make sense of what we hear, to give meaning to it, is phenomenal. We need this bizarrely sophisticated mental equipment because of language. It is difficult but important to grasp that much of the business of understanding spoken language is a task of interpretation, not of hearing in the physical sense. To take a simple example, in spoken language there are no aural breaks between words, no silences that those little blank white spaces on a page purport to represent. This is why it is so hard to understand conversation in a language that one is not entirely fluent in: spoken face-to-face or read it may be possible to have good comprehension, but it is extremely hard for the brain to decide where to put the gaps between the words when they are spoken fast and without full ‘lip-sync’. In fact, there is no aural difference between ‘I scream’ and ‘ice cream’, ‘some mothers’ and ‘some others’, ‘The good can decay many ways’ and ‘The good candy came anyways’. Where the word is new to the hearer the ingenuity of the brain is particularly evident: ‘They played the Bohemian Rap City,’ wrote an American high-school student of a concert, for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. This is not, as we were too often told as children, ‘sloppy mumbling’. These pairings are called ‘oronyms’ and they seem particularly to delight small children. They are the basis of many playground jokes and rhymes, like:
A Book of Silence Page 7